The present invention relates to a technology of an image processing apparatus, a certification photograph taking apparatus and a certification photograph creation system for taking and/or creating a certification photograph.
Hitherto, a certification photograph must be taken by a professional photographer in a studio. This is because that it is difficult for an armature photographer to determine the position where a main subject is to be located in the frame of a photograph and to determine the size of the main subject in the frame based on the size of an aimed certification photograph. Further, when a customer requests a photo-labo to create a certification photograph from a photographic film on which an image is recorded by him or her, usually, it is necessary to perform so-called trimming for cutting a portion of the image in accordance with the size of a certification photograph and reproducing the cut portion as a photograph having a necessary size. At this time, in a conventional photoprinter employing direct exposure, the trimming is carried out in such a manner that after the unnecessary region of an image recorded on a film is masked and the film is aligned, light is projected through an image region cut by the trimming so as to enlarge the cut image and a light-sensitive material is exposed by the light projected thereto.
In contrast, recently, a digital photoprinter has been in practical use which is arranged such that an image recorded on a film is read photoelectrically and converted into digital signals, which are subjected to various kinds of image processing to produce recording image data; and a light-sensitive material is exposed by scanning with recording light modulated in accordance with the image data, thereby recording a (latent) image that is then processed photoelectrically to produce a (finished) print. According to the digital photoprinter, trimming can be more easily carried out with a higher degree of freedom by cutting an image by the image processing and employing electronic magnification processing. However, even if the trimming is carried out by the digital photoprinter, the processing such as cutting of an image and electronic magnification is a special job that is time-consuming to an operator, and productivity is reduced by the processing.
To cope with the above problem, various types of trimming technologies which are performed by the digital photoprinter have been proposed.
For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 11-17780 discloses an art in which the aspect ratio of a trimming region is set by being selected or calculated in accordance with the size of an output image and trimming is instructed in accordance with the thus set aspect ratio.
Further, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 8-125909 discloses an art in which the recorded image data of a predetermined region is extracted from recorded image data output from a photographing camera, a background color is recognized from the extracted image data having been recorded, an aimed image is cut based on the recognized background color and framing control is carried out so that the aimed image having been cut is located at a desired position.
However, these conventional technologies still have room to be further improved from the view point of simple creation of a certification photograph because they do not aim at the creation of the certification photograph.